Board Appearance

One of the things I've been having a hard time with is deciding what the board should look like. If I deck it out to my own tastes, it would probably going to be light text on a dark background with a lot of the more serious images from the original Fate, novel and anime alike. The problem with this lies in the fact that it may be too dark for some people and some aspects of the roleplaying. So my tastes are out. Or are they?

I was thinking what I'd do, assuming that I filch the idea Akeii mentioned and set up day and night 'phases', is have two seperate board themes set up. While we're in the day phase, I'd have it set to a dark-on-light theme with more joyous imagery. When we shift to the night phase, I'd set the board to a light-on-dark theme with more serious tones. The pros are that you'd be able to tell what time it is in Tomiya at a glance and it would usually fit the mood of the story. The problem with this idea is that the forum theme is going to be flipping back and fourth and it might get annoying to some people.

Optimally, once I set both themes up I can put an option in the profile settings for theme. Then you could decide whether you want to keep the day theme, night theme, or alternate between the two of them in the way I described above. That might be a bit out of reach for Forumotion's system, however, so I'm not sure how I'd arrange it.

Alternatively, if I found a way to do theme options in the profile, I can just set up a few of them and put them all in there so people can use whatever they want. Or maybe I'm thinking about this too much when everyone thinks the plain gray setup right now is just fine.

If we have some good scenes within the roleplaying, I can try my hand at sketching some of them and see if I can make some custom pictures so that we don't have to decorate the forum with characters that probably aren't going to show up in our writing. But I can't promise anything on that front. I have terrible motivation issues when it comes to art.

Anyway, what do you guys think? Is the day/night coin idea good or bad? If you don't like it, what kinds of themes would you like to see? If you do.. Well, mostly I'd just want to know which characters people want to see during which phase.

Coming from an RP background that implemented the Night/Day cycle, I totally approve. Only... I hope that this doesn't turn out being too much work for you! =)

An opinion I have - that I hope is helpful - is that your night theme doesn't neccessarily have to be a dark background per se. For the night theme, for example, you could go with somewhat dark blues like a night sky and complement that with a silvery lunar design as tribute to Type/Moon. What I guess I'm trying to say is that it doesn't have to be oppressive - a night sky, for example, might give a more "open" feel for members than a dark room.

Regarding the artwork (If you're willing to give the original characters a shot), I thought it might be really cool if we could implement the F/SN characters in casual dress for Day and battle gear for Night. Definitely, something like Saber's white blouse/dark blue skirt outfit for day and battle armor for night shouldn't be amiss. Anyways. These are just suggestions. I already like our current theme, but if you believe it could look even more awesome, I'm willing to try it out!